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Saturday, November 27, 2010

Just One Charm Pack - Inverted Nine Patch

This is the first pattern that I scratched out on a piece of scrap paper sometime last year, and I've made it or some variation of it 3 times since then. So it has a near and dear place in my quilter's heart. I hope you love it!

First, the supplies:

1 charm pack or (42) 5" squares - I used 12 Days of Christmas by Kate Spain

3 yards of background fabric (you'll have extra) - I used Kona Charcoal

1 yard for the inner border and binding - from 12 Days of Christmas

1.75 yards of a coordinating print for the outer border (you'll have extra if you want to make throw pillows, etc.) - also from 12 Days of Christmas

Now, I need to talk to you for a minute about buying your yardage. Yes, it looks gorgeous when your borders are all matchy-matchy and come from the same line of fabric as your charm pack. But if you're like me, you don't always think this far ahead when you buy the charm pack. If you're absolutely desperate for the charm pack and borders to come from the same collection, but said collection came out 2 years ago, throw yourself at the mercy of quiltshops.com, etsy, and/or ebay, and be prepared to maybe pay some hefty prices ($9-11/yard in some cases). If you're a little more flexible, look for coordinating prints from the designer's more recent collections. Or go whole hog crazy and find something from a completely different collection/designer/manufacturer. Despite what you may have seen or read, mixing fabrics from different designers and manufacturers can have beautiful results.

Back to the regularly scheduled tutorial...

Preface: All seams are 1/4" (0.25"), unless you like to live dangerously.

1. I'll go ahead and put myself out there and say that the first thing I always do is pre-wash my YARDAGE because I'm old skool like that. Feel free to ignore me and not pre-wash. My feelings won't be hurt. Just don't try to pre-wash your charm squares. The final results will make you cry, okay? Please, just don't do it.

2. Next, you'll want to open your charm pack (one of the most exhilirating steps for me) and closely examine all the lovely fabrics.

3. After that, cut each charm square into (2) 2.5"x5" logs. If your rotary blade is nice and sharp, feel free to stack 2-3 charm squares at a time to make the process go a little quicker. After you're all done, set them aside for now.

4. The next step is to cut the background fabric. All in all, you'll need (33) 2.5" strips.

Then cut 3 of them into (42) 2.5" squares. Set aside the other background strips for now.

**As I cut, I like to use Bonnie Hunter's trick of pinning 10 units together, so I can quickly eyeball how many squares or logs I've cut thus far.

Assembling the blocks...

7. Take 1 background log (2.5"x5") and one log from a charm square and sew them together along the 5" line.

Rinse and repeat 83 more times. (Chain-piecing is your friend!)

8. Iron seams, according to your own preference (open or to the side). In this case, since there are no pesky triangle points to create lots of bulk, I'm ironing towards the background side.

9. At this point, the units should measure roughly 4.5"x5." If making these measurements exact is important to you, please square up each unit accordingly.

10. Next, cut each of the 4.5"x5" units into (2) 2.5"x4.5" logs, each with a charm and background square. Note: If you'd like the charm square prints in each 9-patch block to match, be sure to keep like log squares together. If you're less concerned with matching, feel free to dump them in a sack and shuffle them around to increase the scrappiness of the quilt.

11. Now, it's time to piece again. Grab 3 and only 3 logs. If you want the charm square prints within each block to match, be sure you're grabbing 3 logs from the same print. First create a typical 4-patch with 2 logs - where the charm and background squares alternate to create their own mini-checkerboard. Press the seam.

12.Now, add the 3rd log to the top or bottom of the 4-patch. At this point, it really doesn't matter which side you attach it to, as long as you keep the charm-background squares alternating. Press the seam.

13. With the final charm-background log, grab one of the 2.5" background squares from waaaaay back in step 5, and sew it to the charm pack print of the log.

14. Then press the seam.

At this point, your block should be in 2 pieces - a 4.5"x6.5" log, and a 2.5"x6.5" skinny log.

15. Being careful to align the seams, sew together these two pieces so that the background and charm prints alternate.

16. Then press the seam.

17. If all went according to plan, you should be looking at a 6.5"x6.5" finished square. Admittedly, very little in my sewing room goes exactly according to plan, so I sometimes need to square up the egregiously misformed blocks.

Now, it's time to make a decision about sashing. Let me just say that I love adding sashing to quilts because it makes it a lot easier to fudge blocks that are ever so slightly different in size. Don't believe me? Ask Sharyn Squier Craig. I heard her at my first quilt guild meeting ever, and she is a genius with tons of great ideas on how to solve the problem of blocks that are not exactly the same size. Sashing is one of them.

But if you'd prefer NOT to sash these blocks, I totally understand. I even skipped it once when I was short on time, so short on time,in fact, that I didn't take a picture of the finished quilt. But here's a picture of the quilt top, where you get the idea. For you renegades who decide not to sash, see below.

If you decide to sash, please follow me.

18. Lay out your 9-patch blocks on a design wall, the floor, or anywhere you have enough space, in a 6x7 grid (assuming you used 42 squares). Keep in mind that you'll have sashing between each block, so don't get too caught up in making the flow of colors absolutely perfect. The sashing will ever so slightly break up that flow.

19. Since I don't have a design wall set up anywhere, I try to stack and pin each row of blocks in nicely-labeled stacks, where top to bottom, the squares are running left to right. Honestly y'all, what would we do without post-it notes?

21. Now, it's time to cut the horizontal sashing strips. All told, you'll need 8 of them, and they'll all need to be 50.5". So, it varies from one manufacturer to another or even one bolt to another exactly how wide a piece of fabric is. I'm going to assume that *most* not all bolts will be roughly 42" wide. So set aside 8 pieces of 2.5"xWOF strips and then cut (8) 2.5"x9" strips from the 2 remaining strips.

22. Next, you'll need to sew together the 2.5"xWOF strip and the 2.5"x9" strip to create the horizontal sashing strips.

23. Press the seam.

Assembling the middle of the quilt top

24. Grab the pieces of vertical sashing (2.5"x6.5") and start attaching them to the 9-patch squares. On the first 9-patch of each row, attach the vertical sashing to both the right and left side of the square. After that, only attach it to the right side of the square.

25. I press all my seams as I go along towards the 9-patch. I've found that the rows turn out considerably less wonky if I press as I go, as opposed to waiting until I get to the end of the row to press seams. I'm also careful to pin the row label back on the left-most block, so that I can better keep track of which row is which.

27. Attach the horizontal sashing. At this point, I become a fanatic with the straight pins and pin the sashing to the rows every 4 or 5 inches. If you like living dangerously, by all means, please ignore me. For Row 1, be sure to attach horizontal sashing to both the top and bottom of the row. For rows 2-7, just attach horizontal sashing to the bottom of each row.

28. Press all those seams you just sewed towards the 9-patches.

29. Now at this point, you're probably looking at a little bit of extra fabric on one of both sides of the horizontal sashing. Take a trip over to the cutting board to trim the overages.

Time for borders!!

30. It's time for the dreaded task of adding borders. This is my least favorite task because I'm oh so close to the end but still kind of far away. So, for the inner border, cut (6) 2.5" strips from your inner border fabric.

31. Sew 2 strips end to end, and press the seam. Rinse and repeat with 2 more strips.

32. For love of Jove, PIN these strips to 2 sides of your quilt, so you're not stuck with any wavy surprises later - I like to start with the long sides to get them over with.

Now, you can sew them, remove the pins, and press the seams. Then cut off the excess. (If you're a deputy member of the Quilt Police, please forgive me for not measuring my quilt top 8 times before I attach the borders, then simply lopping off the excess.)

33. For the shorter sides, attach one piece of the excess inner border you just trimmed to one of the remaining 2.5XWOF strips. Repeat for the other excess strip and the final 2.5XWOF inner border strip.

34. Repeat step 32 for the shorter sides of the quilt.

35. Now to start on the larger borders. For this particular pattern, I usually cut them the same size as the 9-patch. So, cut 6 strips of fabric - 6.5"xWOF - this will be Just Enough. It might be a good idea to cut 7 strips to be on the safe side if you cut off your selvages.

36. Repeat Steps 31 and 32 with your 6.5" strips, beginning with the long sides (assuming you started with the long sides. If not, then start with the short sides).

37. Repeat step 33 to create the outer borders (6.5" strips) for the short sides of the quilt.

38. Just keep pinning! At this point, I'm tempted to start getting sloppy, but believe me, if you keep pinning, your life will be much easier. Pin this last set of borders to the shorter sides of the quilt, sew the seams, remove the pins, then press.

39. Sit back and admire all your handiwork, while you ponder how you'll quilt it.

40. Now it's time to make your backing. Since I still make lots of snafus when machine quilting, I like to use a somewhat busy print for the backing to mask some of my mistakes. When it comes to piecing the back, I don't like to sew any more than one seam. Since few of my quilts have ever been wider than 80", that means I usually buy between 3.5-5 yards of fabric, find the half-way point, make one cut, trim the selvages, them sew the trimmed sides together (that used to have selvages). This is just how I usually do things. If you have another method, please feel free to use it instead. After that's all done, don't forget to press your seam(s) and also take a moment to press the rest of the backing fabric itself.

41. Next up is basting the quilt. The best tutorial I've found for safety-pin basting is here at Oh, Fransson. Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel, I'm going to point you to Elizabeth's sage advice.

42. Now it's time to quilt! Again, I'm no machine-quilting expert by any means, but here are a few links for inspiration. I know some of them are for long-arm quilters, but don't be discouraged! A lot of long-armers quilt free-motion, and watching their videos can be incredibly helpful if you're looking for ideas. I've also had great success tracing designs onto tracing paper, pinning the paper on my quilt (being sure to remove safety pins below!), then following the design, and ripping off the paper.

43. Whew, almost done! The tie that binds... I almost always do straight-grain binding - that is, no bias cuts for me. If you prefer bias cuts, have at it! For straight-grain binding, you'll probably need about 7 strips - I like a skinny binding, so I cut my strips 2.25" wide, fold them over, then press them, attach to the front of the quilt with my machine, then I tack the binding down by hand while I watch a movie on the couch. Here are some binding tutorials with play by play instructions:

2 comments:

Hi Megan!What a GREAT pattern...thank you so much for doing all the extra work to share it with us (I KNOW how long it takes and how much work it is because I'm still documenting my 'tutorial' on how to use the go cutter... :)).I can see some inverted nine patches with my leftover charm packs in the future!Hugs, Julia